Lightworks: Janice Mason Steeves

 

This will be Mason Steeves' first solo show with CIRCA Gallery, but the artist already has an established career and list of collectors; her oil and cold wax paintings reside in numerous private and public collections around the world. Her paintings illustrate Mason Steeves' long held fascination with light and color, and the multiple translucent layers she lays down with an assortment of tools (including an occasion brush) create minimal, mysterious works that clearly resonate with viewers. 

 

Mason Steeves lives and works in Rockwood, Ontario, but frequently travels to historically sacred sites and remote corners of the world where light -- of the physical and metaphysical -- inspire and inform her work. The paintings for LIGHTWORKS were largely influenced by an artist residency that Mason Steeves attended in May 2015 in Saxnas, a tiny town in northern Sweden, one degree south of the Arctic Circle.

 

"At some times of day, the land and the water took on the most beautiful colors of turquoise and blue, and around midnight, the sky and water turned pink. It was incredible. The days were about 20 hours long and even when the sun set, there was no darkness," Mason Steeves said. "I'm interested in expressing a minimal, meditative quality in my work that speaks of the outer light of these northern places and inner light of the sacred sites, and in my work I reference a meeting place between the spiritual and the physical in describing my sense of light both felt and remembered."